William Bell Hanna, who as a young Bechtel Corp. engineer helped build an oil pipeline through the Venezuelan jungle and later was a supervisor at the huge shipbuilding program at Sausalito's Marinship during World War II, has died at the age of 89.

Mr. Hanna died April 14 in Greenbrae.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mr. Hanna attended Stanford University in the late 1930s and was recruited straight out of college by Stephen Bechtel Sr. , then head of the big San Francisco-based construction firm. Mr. Hanna was sent to Bechtel's first overseas project, building a 78-mile pipeline from inland oil fields, through the jungle of Venezuela and to the coast.

Years later, "Bechtel Briefs," an in-house Bechtel publication, said Mr. Hanna "recalls one trip deep into the interior, to a native village on the Orinoco River called Carapito. He and (pipeline manager George S. Colley Jr.) made it in two days on a Land Rover. When they arrived, Colley told Hanna, 'Well, this is it. This is where you work. Build the roads and the dikes we need. Your bulldozer should show up in a day or two.'

"Sure enough, it did. Hanna remembers: 'It came down-river from Ciudad Bolivar. I spent the next three months with that 'dozer, living on a houseboat with nothing but crocodiles for friends and playmates. In those days,' says Hanna, 'we worked as a tight team, and we were few in number. We did everything; there was no line of demarkation or organizational structure as we have today. We were just a group of pipeliners who would be welding or laying pipe one day and be off in the jungle the next, running a bulldozer. It was an experience I will never forget.' "

During WWII, Mr. Hanna was appointed a general superintendent on the crash program of shipbuilding at Marinship in Sausalito. The Marinship yard, run by Bechtel, was created on Richardson Bay's mudflats. Marinship, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, produced 93 ships, according to the Army Corps of Engineers Web site.

In 1942, Mr. Hanna married Helen Sperry, who, in September 1944, christened one of the Marinship tankers, the SS Antelope Hills. Mr. Hanna's daughter, Helen Black, said that while her father was at Marinship, he "really wanted to join the Army." Bechtel executives, who valued Mr. Hanna's supervising capabilities on the shipbuilding program, had to send men to the local Army recruiting office to retrieve Mr. Hanna when he occasionally thought about leaving Marinship to join the military, she said.

After the war, Mr. Hanna continued working for Bechtel, first in the United States and then back in South America. For most of his Bechtel career, he worked on pipelines, oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other big jobs for which the multinational firm was known.

In the early 1960s, he moved to the British Isles, first working on a big oil refinery in Wales. In 1968, he was appointed resident manager of Bechtel's London office. His projects extended across Europe and into North Africa and Saudi Arabia. A year later, he was elected to the board of Bechtel International Ltd. It was also in 1969 that his wife, Helen, died. In 1970, he married the former Edith Wollman Jenkins.

After retiring from Bechtel in the 1970s, Mr. Hanna worked as a vice president for Ralph Parsons Co., the big Los Angeles construction firm.

Mr. Hanna is survived by his wife, Edith of Greenbrae; two daughters, Helen Black of Canton Center, Conn., and Carolyn Murphy of West Columbia, S.C.; and three grandchildren.